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Topic: Best Discworld Book To Start With? (Read 2088 times)

I'm boring and a traditionalist and it's terrible but I'd start at the Colour of Magic and then go on sequentially, in the order they were written. I've done some "skipping about" over the last few books, and I'm finding it really difficult to work out in my head where in the sequence they fit. I know that the stories are, to some extent, separate, but the threads are so entangled that I feel that reading them in order would help with the knowledge of the Discworld - especially CoM/Light Fantastic/Mort where so much of the basic background and terminology is introduced.

I got into Pratchett's books through Guards, Guards and I'd recommend it. The Colour of Magic has a lot of sci-fi and fantasy specific injokes that you might not get if you aren't a fan of the genre, while Guards Guards has a broader appeal.

This is true. And more problematic, for many people, is that The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are parodies of science fiction series and styles that aren't nearly as big now as they were when the books first came out. If you know Pern, and Conan, and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and I forget what else, you're golden. If you don't you might be very confused.